La Grande Vitesse, a public sculpture by American artist Alexander Calder, is located on the large concrete plaza surrounding City Hall and the Kent County Building in Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States. Popularly referred to as simply "the Calder", since its installation in 1969 it has come to be a symbol of Grand Rapids, and an abstraction of it is included in the city's official logo.[1]

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The sculpture was the first public art work funded by the Art in Public Places program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Fabricated in Tours, France and assembled on the plaza, the steel sculpture is 43 feet tall, 54 feet long, and 30 feet wide, and weighs 42 tons. It is painted in Calder's signature bright red. The title is French for “the great swiftness”,[2] which can also be translated as "grand rapids".

Calder’s design for La Grande Vitesse was consistent with other monumental sculptures he was commissioned to create during this period in his career. He dubbed these works "stabiles", in contrast to his mobiles. The sculpture is a popular gathering place for residents and tourists alike, and it is the centerpiece of the city’s annual Festival of the Arts.

A panel of local officials and nationally recognized art experts selected Calder for the commission in 1967. After Calder was chosen and residents learned of his plans, a controversy ensued. Opponents wrote letters to the editor and created songs and cartoons deriding the sculpture, and advocates used the mayor’s bully pulpit and public service television to call attention to Calder’s credentials and vision. La Grande Vitesse was formally dedicated on June 14, 1969, and has since become a popular civic symbol.

After receiving the architectural plans and specified materials for the development of the site,[3] Calder completed an 8-foot maquette in 1968, and began fabrication at the Biémont foundry in Tours, France later that year. The work was shipped in 27 pieces, packed in wooden crates and assembled on-site over five days. According to project advocate Nancy Mulnix Tweddale, "It was all laid out like a jigsaw puzzle. It was fascinating for people to watch this big object grow before their very eyes. The sparks flew as the welders worked and then the vivid color was painted on. It was like outdoor theater."[4]

The $128,000 cost of commissioning, fabricating, shipping, and installing the sculpture was shared by the NEA, local philanthropic foundations, area businesses, and individual citizens.[4] The wife of former FDIC Chairman L. William Seidman, Sarah "Sally" Seidman, was described as "instrumental" in bringing the artwork to Grand Rapids.[5]

There is a 1/23-sized model of La Grande Vitesse displayed and mounted near the base of the stabile itself, created with Calder's approval by the Keeler Brass Co. in 1976. It was donated by Mike and Mary Ann Keeler, original contributors in the acquisition of the huge sculpture, and created by the company Mike Keeler's grandfather and great uncles founded in the late 1800s so that blind visitors to the location could "see" the sculpture in its entirety.[6]

The Civic Center in which the sculpture is sited was designed by Chicago architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The site features two black, rectilinear, curtain-walled buildings for City Hall and Kent County, surrounded by a concrete plaza. The county building, which is shorter with a larger footprint, features has an enlarged reproduction of a Calder painting on its roof.[7] The construction and sculpture projects were part of a downtown urban renewal effort. The area is formally named Vandenberg Plaza, after Senator Arthur Vandenberg, but is popularly referred to as Calder Plaza.

1.
Alexander Calder
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Calder’s monumental stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced wire figures, which are like drawings made in space, Alexander Sandy Calder was born in 1898 in Lawnton, Pennsylvania. His actual birthday, however, remains a source of much confusion, according to Calders mother, Nanette, Calder was born on August 22, yet his birth certificate at Philadelphia City Hall, based on a hand-written ledger, stated July 22. When Calders family learned about the certificate, they reasserted with certainty that city officials had made a mistake. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a sculptor who created many public installations. Calders mother was a portrait artist, who had studied at the Académie Julian. She moved to Philadelphia, where she met Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Calders parents married on February 22,1895, his sister, Mrs. Margaret Calder Hayes, was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum. In 1902, Calder posed nude for his father’s sculpture The Man Cub and that same year he also completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant. Three years later, Stirling Calder contracted tuberculosis, and Calders parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, the children were reunited with their parents in late March 1906 and stayed at the ranch in Arizona until fall of the same year. After Arizona, the Calder family moved to Pasadena, California, the windowed cellar of the family home became Calders first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire that he found in the street to make jewelry for his sisters dolls, on January 1,1907, Nanette Calder took her son to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calders miniature circus performances, in the fall of 1909, the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where Calder briefly attended Germantown Academy, then moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. That Christmas, he sculpted a dog and an out of sheet brass as gifts for his parents. The sculptures are three-dimensional and the duck is kinetic because it rocks when gently tapped, in Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by his fathers painter friend Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains. Calder described it, We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes and we even lit up some cars with candle lights. After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to New York City, while living in Spuyten Duyvil, Calder attended high school in nearby Yonkers. During Calders high school years, the family moved back and forth between New York and California, in each new location, Calders parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son. Toward the end of period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York

2.
Public art
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Public art is art in any media that has been planned and executed with the intention of being staged in the physical public domain, usually outside and accessible to all. Public art may include any art which is exhibited in a public space including publicly accessible buildings, rather, the relationship between the content and audience, what the art is saying and to whom, is just as important if not more important than its physical location. Cher Krause Knight states, arts publicness rests in the quality, such cultural interventions have often been realised in response to creatively engaging a communitys sense of place or well-being in society. Such commissions can still result in physical, permanent artworks and sculptures and these also often involve increasingly integrated and applied arts type applications. However, they are beginning to include other, much more process-driven. As such, these do not always rely on the production of a physical or permanent artwork at all and this expanded scope of public art can embrace many diverse practices and artforms. These might be implemented as stand-alone, or as collaborative hybrids involving a multi-disciplinary approach, the range of its potential is of course endless, ever-changing, and subject to continual debate and differences of opinion among artists, funders, curators, and commissioning clients. Public art is not confined to objects, dance, procession, street theatre. In a similar example, sculptor Gar Waterman created a giant arch measuring 35x37x3 feet which straddled a city street in New Haven, in Cape Town, South Africa, Africa Centre presents the Infecting the City Public Art Festival. Programs like President Roosevelts New Deal facilitated the development of art during the Great Depression but was wrought with propaganda goals. New Deal art support programs intended to develop national pride in American culture while avoiding addressing the faltering economy that said culture was built upon, although problematic, New Deal programs such as FAP altered the relationship between the artist and society by making art accessible to all people. The New Deal program Art-in-Architecture developed percent for art programs, a structure for funding public art still utilized today and this program gave one half of one percent of total construction costs of all government buildings to purchase contemporary American art for that structure. A-i-A helped solidify the principle that art in the US should be truly owned by the public. They also established the legitimacy of the desire for public art. While problematic at times, early public art programs set the foundation for current public art development, Public art became much more about the public. The will to create a deepest and more pertinent connection between the production of the artwork and the site where it is made visible prompts different orientations, in 1969 Wolf Vostells Stationary traffic was made in Cologne. Between the 1970s and the 1980s, gentrification and ecological issues surface in public art practices both as a motive and as a critical focus brought in by artists. In recent years, programs of green urban regeneration aiming at converting abandoned lots into green areas regularly include public art programs, the 1980s also witness the institutionalisation of sculpture parks as curated programs

3.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci

4.
Grand Rapids, Michigan
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Grand Rapids is the second-largest city in Michigan, and the largest city in West Michigan. It is on the Grand River about 30 miles east of Lake Michigan, as of the 2010 census, the city population was 188,040. In 2010, the Grand Rapids metropolitan area had a population of 1,005,648, Grand Rapids is the county seat of Kent County, Michigan. A historic furniture-manufacturing center, Grand Rapids is home to five of the leading office furniture companies. Its more common nickname of River City refers to the landmark river for which it was named. The city and surrounding communities are diverse, based in the health care, information technology, automotive, aviation. Grand Rapids is the hometown of U. S. President Gerald Ford, for thousands of years, succeeding cultures of indigenous peoples occupied the area. Over 2000 years ago, people associated with the Hopewell culture occupied the Grand River Valley, later, a tribe from the Ottawa River traveled to the Grand River valley, fighting three battles with the Prairie Indians who were established in the area. The tribe later split, with the Chippewas settling in the lower peninsula, the Pottawatomies staying south of the Kalamazoo River. In 1740, an Ottawa man who would later be known as Chief Noonday, between 1761 and 1763, Chief Pontiac visited the area annually, gathering over 3,000 natives and asking them to volunteer to fight the British in Detroit, which would culminate into Pontiacs War. The Potawatomi attacked the Ottawa in 1765, attempting to take the Grand River territory but were defeated, by the end of the 1700s, there were an estimated 1,000 Ottawa in the Kent County area. After the French established territories in Michigan, Jesuit missionaries and traders traveled down Lake Michigan, at the start of the 19th century, European fur traders and missionaries established posts in the area among the Ottawa. They generally lived in peace, trading European metal and textile goods for fur pelts and they were French-speaking and Roman Catholic. They likely both spoke Ottawa, Madelines maternal ancestral language, La Framboise, whose mother was Ottawa and father French, later merged her successful operations with the American Fur Company. By 1810, Chief Noonday established a village on the west side of the river with about 500 Ottawa, madeline La Framboise retired the trading post to Rix Robinson in 1821 and returned to Mackinac. The first permanent European-American settler in the Grand Rapids area was Isaac McCoy, general Lewis Cass, who commissioned Charles Christopher Trowbridge to establish missions for Native Americans in Michigan, ordered McCoy to establish a mission in Grand Rapids for the Ottawa. In 1824, Baptist missionary Rev. L. Slater traveled with two settlers to Grand Rapids to perform work, the winter of 1824 proved to be difficult, with Slaters group having to resupply and return before the spring. Slater then erected the first settler structures in Grand Rapids, a log cabin for himself, in 1825, McCoy returned and established a missionary station

5.
Michigan
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Michigan /ˈmɪʃᵻɡən/ is a state in the Great Lakes and Midwestern regions of the United States. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, Michigan is the tenth most populous of the 50 United States, with the 11th most extensive total area. Its capital is Lansing, and its largest city is Detroit, Michigan is the only state to consist of two peninsulas. The Lower Peninsula, to which the name Michigan was originally applied, is noted to be shaped like a mitten. The Upper Peninsula is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the Straits of Mackinac, the two peninsulas are connected by the Mackinac Bridge. The state has the longest freshwater coastline of any political subdivision in the world, being bounded by four of the five Great Lakes, as a result, it is one of the leading U. S. states for recreational boating. Michigan also has 64,980 inland lakes and ponds, a person in the state is never more than six miles from a natural water source or more than 85 miles from a Great Lakes shoreline. What is now the state of Michigan was first settled by Native American tribes before being colonized by French explorers in the 17th century, the area was organized as part of the larger Northwest Territory until 1800, when western Michigan became part of the Indiana Territory. Eventually, in 1805, the Michigan Territory was formed, which lasted until it was admitted into the Union on January 26,1837, the state of Michigan soon became an important center of industry and trade in the Great Lakes region and a popular immigrant destination. Though Michigan has come to develop an economy, it is widely known as the center of the U. S. automotive industry. When the first European explorers arrived, the most populous tribes were Algonquian peoples, which include the Anishinaabe groups of Ojibwe, Odaawaa/Odawa, the three nations co-existed peacefully as part of a loose confederation called the Council of Three Fires. The Ojibwe, whose numbers are estimated to have been between 25,000 and 35,000, were the largest, French voyageurs and coureurs des bois explored and settled in Michigan in the 17th century. The first Europeans to reach what became Michigan were those of Étienne Brûlés expedition in 1622, the first permanent European settlement was founded in 1668 on the site where Père Jacques Marquette established Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan as a base for Catholic missions, missionaries in 1671–75 founded outlying stations at Saint Ignace and Marquette. Jesuit missionaries were received by the areas Indian populations, with relatively few difficulties or hostilities. In 1679, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle built Fort Miami at present-day St. Joseph, in 1691, the French established a trading post and Fort St. Joseph along the St. Joseph River at the present day city of Niles. The hundred soldiers and workers who accompanied Cadillac built a fort enclosing one arpent, cadillacs wife, Marie Thérèse Guyon, soon moved to Detroit, becoming one of the first European women to settle in the Michigan wilderness. The town quickly became a major fur-trading and shipping post, the Église de Saint-Anne was founded the same year

6.
Red
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Red is the color at the longer-wavelengths end of the spectrum of visible light next to orange, at the opposite end from violet. Red color has a predominant light wavelength of roughly 620–740 nanometers, light with a longer wavelength than red but shorter than terahertz radiation and microwave is called infrared. Red is one of the secondary colors, resulting from the combination of yellow. Traditionally, it was viewed as a primary colour, along with yellow and blue, in the RYB color space and traditional color wheel formerly used by painters. Reds can vary in shade from light pink to very dark maroon or burgundy. Red is the color of cyan. In nature, the red color of blood comes from hemoglobin, the red color of the Grand Canyon and other geological features is caused by hematite or red ochre, both forms of iron oxide. It also causes the red color of the planet Mars, the color of autumn leaves is caused by pigments called anthocyanins, which are produced towards the end of summer, when the green chlorophyll is no longer produced. One to two percent of the population has red hair, the color is produced by high levels of the reddish pigment pheomelanin. Since red is the color of blood, it has historically been associated with sacrifice, danger, modern surveys in the United States and Europe show red is also the color most commonly associated with heat, activity, passion, sexuality, anger, love and joy. In China, India and many other Asian countries it is the color of symbolizing happiness, since the 19th century, red has also been associated with socialism and communism. The word red is derived from the Old English rēad, the word can be further traced to the Proto-Germanic rauthaz and the Proto-Indo European root rewdʰ-. In Sanskrit, the word means red or blood. In the Akkadian language of Ancient Mesopotamia and in the modern Inuit language of Inuit, the words for colored in Latin and Spanish both also mean red. In Portuguese the word for red is vermelho, which comes from Latin vermiculus, in the Russian language, the word for red, Кра́сный, comes from the same old Slavic root as the words for beautiful—красивый and excellent—прекрасный. Thus Red Square in Moscow, named long before the Russian Revolution, in heraldry, the word gules is used for red. Red can vary in hue from orange-red to violet-red, and for each hue there is a variety of shades and tints. Red hematite powder was found scattered around the remains at a grave site in a Zhoukoudian cave complex near Beijing

7.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
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Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP is an American architectural, urban planning, and engineering firm. It was formed in Chicago in 1936 by Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, with a portfolio spanning thousands of projects across 50 countries, SOM is one of the largest architectural firms in the world. Their primary expertise is in commercial buildings, as it was SOM that led the way to the widespread use of the modern international-style or glass box skyscraper. They have designed several of the tallest buildings in the world, including the John Hancock Center, Willis Tower, due to their faithful following of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohes ideas, Frank Lloyd Wright nicknamed them The Three Blind Mies. Notable SOM architects include, Edward Charles Bassett, Natalie de Blois, Gordon Bunshaft, David Childs, Myron Goldsmith, Bruce Graham, Gertrude Kerbis, Fazlur Rahman Khan. Lucien Lagrange, Walter Netsch, Larry Oltmanns, Brigitte Peterhans, Adrian Smith, indeed, Khan is responsible for developing the algorithms that made the Hancock building and many subsequent skyscrapers possible. Another notable SOM engineer is Bill Baker, who is best known as the engineer of Burj Khalifa, to support the towers record heights and slim footprint, he developed the buttressed core structural system, consisting of a hexagonal core reinforced by three buttresses that form a Y shape. Davis Allen, a pioneer in corporate interior design, had a tenure at SOM. Throughout its history, SOM has been recognized more than 1,700 awards for quality. More than 900 of these awards have received since 1998. In 1996 and 1962, SOM received the Architecture Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects, SOM is the only firm to have received this honor twic13 R+D Awards from Architect Magazine. In addition, a collaboration between SOM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, The Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology, was honored with a fifth award. SOM has completed over 10,000 projects around the United States and in more than 50 other countries around the world, london, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Abu Dhabi. Smaller field offices supplement these in such as the Philippines. Burj Khalifa is the tallest man-made structure ever built, at 829.8 m, construction began on 21 September 2004, and the building officially opened on 4 January 2010. The towers architect and engineer was Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, george J. Efstathiou was the Managing Partner for the project. Bill Baker, the Chief Structural Engineer for the project, invented the buttressed core structural system in order to enable the tower to achieve such heights economically, Adrian Smith, who worked with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill until 2006, was the Consulting Design Partner. The primary builder is a joint venture of South Korean Samsung C&T, one World Trade Center, also known as the Freedom Tower, is located in Manhattan, New York City, and is 1,776 ft high, making it the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere

8.
Arthur Vandenberg
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Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg was a Republican Senator from the U. S. state of Michigan who participated in the creation of the United Nations. He is best known for leading the Republican Party from a policy of isolationism to one of internationalism, and supporting the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan. Vandenberg was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the son of Alpha and Aaron Vandenberg, Vandenberg attended public schools there and studied law at the University of Michigan, where he was a member of Delta Upsilon. After a brief stint working in New York at Colliers magazine, he returned home in 1906 to marry his childhood sweetheart and she died in 1917, and in 1918 Vandenberg married Hazel Whitaker. From 1906 to 1928, he worked as a newspaper editor and it was owned by William Alden Smith, who served as a Republican in the U. S. Senate from 1907 to 1919. Vandenberg as publisher made the highly profitable, he was well paid. Vandenberg wrote most of the editorials, calling for more Progressivism in the spirit of his hero Theodore Roosevelt, however he supported President William Howard Taft over Roosevelt in 1912. He was well known for his biography Alexander Hamilton, The Greatest American, Vandenberg was a Mason, Shriner, Elk, and Woodman. On March 31,1928, Governor Fred W. Green appointed 44-year-old Vandenberg, a Republican, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Senator Woodbridge Nathan Ferris, Green made the appointment reluctantly under considerable political pressure. Vandenberg immediately declared his intention to stand for election to both the short, unexpired term and the full six-year term and he became the fifth journalist in the U. S. Senate. Fellow Republican publishers to whom he can look from behind his glasses for encouragement in his maiden speech are Cutting of New Mexico, Capper of Kansas. Senator-publisher Carter Glass of Virginia sits across the aisle among the Democrats, in November 1928, Vandenberg was handily elected for a full term. In the Senate, he piloted into law the Reapportionment Act of 1929 and he was at first an ardent supporter of President Herbert Hoover but he became discouraged by Hoovers intransigence and failures in dealing with the Great Depression. After the election of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, Vandenberg went along with most of the early New Deal measures, except for the NIRA, by the 1934 election, his own political position was precarious, he was still reelected by 52,443 votes. When the new Congress convened in 1935, there were only twenty-five Republican senators and he voted against most Roosevelt-sponsored measures, notable exceptions being the Banking Act of 1935 and the Social Security Act. He pursued a policy of what he called fiscal responsibility, a budget, states rights. He felt that Franklin Roosevelt had usurped the powers of Congress, but at the 1936 Republican National Convention, Vandenberg refused to permit the party to nominate him for Vice President, anticipating Roosevelts victory that year. As part of the coalition of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate

9.
Maya Lin
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Maya Ying Lin is an American designer and artist who is known for her work in sculpture and land art. She first came to fame at the age of 21 as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio. Her parents migrated to the United States from China, her father in 1948 and her mother in 1949 and her father, Henry Huan Lin, born in Fuzhou, Fujian, was a ceramist and former dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts. Her mother, Julia Chang Lin, born in Shanghai, is a poet and she is the niece of Lin Huiyin, who is said to be the first female architect in China. Lin Juemin and Lin Yin Ming, both of whom are among the 72 martyrs of the Second Guangzhou Uprising was a cousin of her grandfather, Lin Chang-min, a Hanlin of Qing dynasty, the emperors teacher, was the father of Lin Hui-yin and great-grandfather of Maya Lin. Lin graduated from Yale University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981 and she has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Yale University, Harvard University, Williams College, and Smith College. She was among the youngest at Yale University to receive an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 1987, Lin is married to Daniel Wolf, a New York photography dealer. They have two daughters, India and Rachel, Lin is the youngest of her generation, and has an older brother, the poet Tan Lin. Growing up, she did not have friends and stayed home a lot. She loved school and loved to study, when she was not studying, she took independent courses from Ohio University and spent her free time casting bronzes in the school foundry. In 1981, at age 21 and while still an undergraduate, Lin won a design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The black cut-stone masonry wall, with the names of 57,661 fallen soldiers carved into its face, was completed in late October 1982, the wall is granite and V-shaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument. Lins conception was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers, the design was initially controversial for what was an unconventional and non-traditional design for a war memorial. Opponents of the design also voiced objection because of Lins Asian ethnicity, her being female, in 2007, the American Institute of Architects ranked the memorial #10 on their list of Americas Favorite Architecture. Lin believes that if the competition had not been blind, with designs submitted by name instead of number and she received harassment after her ethnicity was revealed. Prominent businessman and later third party presidential candidate Ross Perot called her an egg roll after it was revealed that she was Asian, Lin defended her design in front of the United States Congress, and eventually a compromise was reached. A bronze statue of a group of soldiers and an American flag was placed off to one side of her design, in 1994, she was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary Maya Lin, A Strong Clear Vision. The title comes from an address she gave at Juniata College in which she spoke of the monument design process, according to Maya Lin, art should be an act of every individual willing to say something new and that which is not quite familiar

10.
Alexander Stirling Calder
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Alexander Stirling Calder was an American sculptor and teacher. Calder was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1870, at the age of 16, A. Stirling Calder attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he studied under Thomas Eakins. He apprenticed as a sculptor the following year, working on his fathers sculpture program for Philadelphia City Hall. In 1890, he moved to Paris where he studied at the Académie Julian under Henri Michel Chapu, in 1892 he returned to Philadelphia and began his career as a sculptor in earnest. His first major commission, won in a competition, was for a larger-than-life-size statue of Dr. Samuel Gross for the National Mall in Washington. Calder replicated the pose of Dr. Gross from Eakinss 1876 painting The Gross Clinic and that was followed by a set of twelve larger-than-life-size statues of Presbyterian clergymen for the facade of the Witherspoon Building in Philadelphia. In 1906, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and he contracted tuberculosis in 1906, and moved to Arizona and then California, for his health. In Pasadena, he modeled architectural sculpture for the Throop Polytechnic Institute and he returned to the east coast in 1910. In 1912, he was named acting-chief of the program for the Panama-Pacific Exposition. He obtained a studio in NYC and there employed the services of model Audrey Munson who posed for him – Star Maiden – and a host of other artists. For the Exposition, Calder completed three massive sculpture groups, The Nations of the East and The Nations of the West, which crowned triumphal arches, following Bitters sudden death in April 1915, Calder completed the Depew Memorial Fountain in Indianapolis, Indiana. Hermon Atkins MacNeil and Calder were commissioned to create sculptures for the Washington Square Arch in New York City. George Washington as Commander-in-Chief, Accompanied by Fame and Valor was sculpted by MacNeil and these are sometimes referred to as Washington at War and Washington at Peace. He sculpted a number of works for Vizcaya, the James Deering estate outside Miami. These included the famous Italian Barge, a folly in the shape of a boat. He was one of a dozen sculptors invited to compete in Oklahomas Pioneer Woman statue competition in 1927 and that year he was also commissioned by the Berkshire Museum to sculpt the woodwork and fountain of the Museums Ellen Crane Memorial Room in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. An institution that would see his more famous son, Alexander. In 1929, he won the competition for a monumental statue of Leif Eriksson

The Nations of the West (1915), Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, California. This massive sculpture group crowned the Arch of the Setting Sun. A second group, The Nations of the East (including a life-size elephant), crowned the Arch of the Rising Sun.